Mafia Cop Killers in Akron

by Mark J. Price

  Speculation immediately arose that the shootings were related to Rosario Borgia’s Furnace Street gang. Investigators downplayed a connection, though, believing that the Damico brothers were petty thieves. There were unusual ties, however. The Hickory Street shootout was only a few blocks away from Furnace, and Patrolmen George Werne and Will McDonnell were the first Akron officers to arrest Borgia in 1916.

  “Rosario Borgia had the right hunch,” McDonnell said at the hospital. “Borgia told me when I saw him a few hours before his execution that I’d better watch out or someone would get me. I didn’t think, however, that it would come so soon.”

  Initially given a slim chance for survival, McDonnell and McGowan recovered from their wounds and enjoyed long careers with the force.

  The community rallied around Werne’s grieving family. Akron rubber executives C.B. Raymond of Goodrich, C.W. Seiberling of Goodyear and William F. O’Neil of General pledged $250 apiece to pay off the mortgage on the Werne house. The Akron Beacon Journal established a fund that collected more than $3,300 in three weeks. The American-Italian League of Akron raised $200 for the widow and children.

  “We deeply regret the crimes that some of our people have committed, and desire to make it known to the public that these people who have no regard for law and order do not represent the better class of Italians,” said Akron banker Francis S. Massimino, league president. “We shall do all in our power to run down these fellows responsible for the disgraceful crimes committed.”

  On March 12, the first anniversary of the death of Gethin Richards, two dozen officers escorted Werne’s casket from the family home on Marcy Street to St. Bernard Catholic Church to Holy Cross Cemetery. Pallbearers were Sergeants Edward Heiber, Edward Heffernan and Patrick Raleigh and Patrolmen Eugene Murray, Henry Bergdoll and John McMenamin. In his eulogy, Reverend Joseph M. Paulus noted, “Society must protect itself, law must be respected and obeyed and criminals must be punished.”

  Cafarelli and his wife, Anna, had four young children—Elizabeth, seven; Adeline, five; Fannie, three; and Dominic, six months—with a fifth, Grace, on the way. The family rented apartments at the grocery to the Damico brothers. A christening party for the infant Dominic was planned on the day that Werne was killed, and investigators theorized that Cafarelli and his tenants raided the coop to serve chicken at the reception. Cafarelli said that his wife bought chicken for the christening, but Patrolman Patsy Pappano reported finding a burlap bag with feathers inside, plus locks and hinges that may have come from the coop.

  Cafarelli insisted that he didn’t own a gun and never fired a shot. He maintained that he was a victim of circumstance and that Will McDonnell had confused him with gunman Panfilio Damico. The only reason he was on the tracks was that the Damico brothers were shaking him down for cash, he said. “I did not want to go out that morning,” he said. “First they said to go and get some fresh air, and when I said I did not want to leave because the baby was sick, they said I had to go out, they forced me to go out.”

  He said he tried stopping twice, but the brothers pushed him along. Eventually, Panfilio turned to him and said, “You know the purpose we came down here for,” Cafarelli said. The brothers took two checks for about fifty-five dollars and were just about to take the seventeen dollars in his pocket when the police walked up, he said.

  Judge William J. Ahern presided over Vincenzo Damico’s trial, which opened on May 22. Prosecutor Cletus G. Roetzel, back from military service, handled the state’s case. Attorney Rolland Jones led the defense.

  Jones argued that fugitive Panfilio, not Vincenzo, fired the fatal shots. Furthermore, he said Panfilio fired in self-defense, thinking the plainclothes officers were hobos intent on robbing them. “The three officers were brigands, assassins, by not showing their badges,” Damico said. “I did not see any badges.”

  Jurors deliberated forty minutes May 26 before finding him guilty. Jailers found Damico weeping on the cell floor. “I kill nobody,” he cried after being sentenced to death. He was taken June 2 to the death house, where Furnace Street gangster Paul Chiavaro, the prisoner in the next cell, greeted Damico in Italian.

  Judge William Ahern presided over the Peter Cafarelli and Vincenzo Damico cases. He died unexpectedly at age thirty-eight. Author’s collection.

  Paul Chiavaro was executed on July 24, 1919, for the murder of Patrolman Gethin Richards. He died with a smile on his lips. Courtesy of Ohio History Connection (State Archives Series 1000 AV).

  The execution of Chiavaro on July 24, 1919, was almost an afterthought. Only seventeen witnesses were present as the thirty-one-year-old walked to the death chamber with Reverend Francis Louis Kelly. A serene Chiavaro prayed, kissed a crucifix and wore a faint smile as attendants strapped him to the electric chair.

  “Have you anything to say before the sentence is executed?” Warden Preston E. Thomas asked.

  “Nothing to say,” Chiavaro said. Switches were thrown, electricity hummed and Chiavaro died at 12:09 a.m. with a smile on his lips.

  Cleveland attorney Benjamin D. Nicola, who had filed several motions in an effort to spare his client, was heartbroken. “It is a mistake, I am sure, to put Chiavaro to death,” he said. “I believe he is innocent.”

  The execution of Vincenzo Damico, age twenty-five, took place on March 31, 1920. The condemned man cried, “Mother Maria! Mother Maria!” as Father Kelly walked with him to the electric chair. The death house lights flickered at 12:06 a.m., and Damico’s body was taken to Calvary Cemetery in Columbus. “Nineteen men have been electrocuted during my regime here, and it is the first time that a man met his end crying,” Warden Thomas said.

  Vincenzo Damico was executed on March 31, 1920, for the murder of Patrolman George Werne. He cried while being led to the electric chair. Courtesy of Ohio History Connection (State Archives Series 1000 AV).

  Maintaining his innocence, Pietro “Peter” Cafarelli fought tooth and nail. He was convicted of murder in a June 1919 trial and sentenced to death in October, but the appellate court rejected the verdict and ordered a new trial because the defense had not been allowed to examine a list of six potential jurors.

  In the second trial, which began on February 26, 1920, defense attorney Joseph V. Zottarelli argued that Cafarelli had feared for his life when Vincenzo and Panfilio Damico demanded his cash after forcing him down the railroad tracks. He actually felt relieved to see the plainclothes officers, he said. “Cafarelli regarded the arrival of these three men as an intervention of Divine Providence, and he said fervently to himself and his God, ‘My God, I thank thee for sending these men to save me,’” Zottarelli said.

  On March 5, the jury convicted Cafarelli of first-degree murder with a recommendation of mercy, sparing him the electric chair. Judge Ahern sentenced him March 13 to life in prison. “All I have to say, your honor, is that I am innocent, and I am convinced that I can show my innocence yet,” Cafarelli said.

  For more than ten years, Cafarelli tried to clear his name at the Ohio Penitentiary. Prisoner 48462 was a model inmate—polite, pious, orderly and obedient—working as a skilled mechanic in the machine shop. During a 1939 interview, the forty-year-old convict told a Beacon Journal reporter, “Maybe you will say in your paper that it was not I who fired the shot, that it was not I who carried the gun, but that it was Damico, and I have been many years here. I am old now.”

  At least three jurors reversed themselves and lobbied state officials for a pardon. Former prosecutor Cletus Roetzel wrote to two Ohio governors to urge Cafarelli’s release, saying, “There is no doubt that Cafarelli is guilty as indicated by the evidence of the trial. I am convinced, however, that he did not fire the shot that killed Werne, and that he is not by nature criminally inclined.”

  Pietro “Peter” Cafarelli, age forty-one, enjoyed one last visit with his wife and five children on April 21, 1930. Three hours later, a savage fire swept through the Columbus penitentiary, killing 322 inmates. Rescue crews found Cafarelli’s body in his locked cell. He was
clutching a rosary when he died. “He was the best prisoner in the penitentiary,” Warden Preston E. Thomas sobbed to a reporter.

  EPILOGUE

  Furnace Street cleaned up its act long ago. The formerly notorious neighborhood is home today to the Northside District, a cultural center of arts, dining, entertainment, shopping and recreation. The district’s attractions in 2017 included Luigi’s Restaurant, an Akron institution since 1949; Dante Boccuzzi Akron, an upscale restaurant owned by a famed Cleveland chef; Jilly’s Music Room, a concert club and tapas bar; Zeber-Martell, an art gallery and studio; Rubber City Clothing, a popular shop for Akron streetwear and accessories; Northside Lofts, luxurious living on the edge of downtown; and the Courtyard by Marriott, a hotel with a Prohibition-themed cocktail bar called the Northside Speakeasy.

  Traveling farther east on Furnace Street, motorists can scarcely imagine what it was like a century ago. Most of the old buildings have been demolished, leaving vacant lots and overgrown woods. It’s like a giant broom swept away the original homes, saloons, brothels, pool halls, restaurants, coffeehouses, hotels, cigar stores, barbershops, tailors shops and confectioneries.

  A little brick building topped with a big white cross is a reminder of yesteryear. The Furnace Street Mission chapel, which was constructed in 1962, replaced the original building where Reverend Bill Denton (1895–1982) established the “Brightest Spot in the Underworld” in the late 1920s. Denton set up a soup kitchen, provided clothes for the needy, operated a halfway house and preached the Gospel at the mission, which originally was located at 121 Furnace Street in Joe Congena’s former pool hall, the hangout of Rosario Borgia.

  “I can remember as a kid being fascinated by a trap door in the back of the building floor that led to a meeting room, which was where the murders were planned,” said Reverend Bob Denton, Bill’s son and successor in the ministry. “Always wanted to explore that but Dad put the quietus to that.”

  Captain Al “Fuzzy” Monzo (1915–2012), an Akron cop for thirty-six years, once explained to the younger Denton how the original building was moved to 140 Furnace. “He was a young kid who lived down here when the neighborhood was primarily Italian,” Denton said. “My dad enlisted a bunch of the kids—including him—to pick up the building, put it on poles and roll it across the street to its final location—about where our drive is on the current property.”

  Irony of ironies, the murderous Furnace Street gang’s old hideout became a place to save souls. The mission opened a halfway house for ex-convicts and established the nationally acclaimed Victim Assistance Program. Borgia definitely wouldn’t recognize the neighborhood today.

  Giacamo Ripellino, better known as Frank Bellini, happily took over Borgia’s criminal enterprises and became one of the region’s most powerful gangsters over the next decade during Prohibition. Police connected him with bootlegging, prostitution and murder, but he never was convicted of any serious crimes. In fact, he was known for his generosity, donating money to poor Italian families. Bellini outwitted his enemies for years, but the fifty-two-year-old let down his guard on June 27, 1929. He and four friends were sitting outside his store at 106 North Howard Street when a large touring car pulled up, curtains parted on the windows, and three shotgun blasts struck Bellini. The car sped away and the gunmen escaped, never to be found. Police suspected that an old friend of Borgia’s was settling a score. Doctors amputated Bellini’s legs at St. Thomas Hospital, and he died of an infection June 28. More than three hundred people attended the rites at St. Vincent Church, which one newspaper described as “Akron’s first intimate glimpse of a gangland funeral.” Bellini was laid to rest in a bronze casket at Holy Cross Cemetery.

  Needy people form a bread line outside Reverend Bill Denton’s Furnace Street Mission in the 1930s. The building at left once stood across the street and served as the lair of the Furnace Street gang. Courtesy of Furnace Street Mission.

  Like so many of his customers, pool hall operator Joe Congena, age thirty-seven, met a violent death. Boarding at the home of Rosario and Rose Cusamano at 118 Furnace, he threatened to blackmail his nineteen-year-old landlady over allegations of marital infidelity with another tenant, Joe Catanio, age thirty-nine. On August 17, 1921, she lured Congena into the cellar, where Catanio killed him with four blows from a hatchet. Rose Cusamano initially alleged self-defense, but she and Catanio were convicted of first-degree murder.

  Furnace Street gang member Salvatore Bambolo joined the U.S. Army, got married in 1920 and stopped hanging out with the wrong crowd. He moved to California, where he operated a fruit and nut business before retiring in 1970. He was eighty-four years old when he died in Lodi, California, in 1980.

  Bambolo’s brother-in-law, Calcedonio Ferraro, registered for the military draft in 1918 after being charged with cracking a safe at the Acme store on North Hill. Following the war, he was convicted of burglary and grand larceny. Upon parole from prison, he settled in Chautauqua, New York, where he lived with his wife, worked as a finisher in a furniture factory and maintained a low profile, dying in January 1967 at age eighty-six.

  Filomena Borgia disappeared from the public eye after the execution of her husband, Rosario Borgia. After being shut out of the gangster’s will, reportedly worth $10,000 (about $191,000 in 2017), she quietly walked away. Official documents shed little light on her departure from Akron. Someone with her name died in 1923 in New York, but that might be a coincidence. Perhaps she remarried using one of her husband’s many aliases. If so, one can only hope that she became more selective in her choice of men. But wait a minute. Census records from 1930 show a Filomena Borgia living in New York with a Dominick Borgia. Rosario’s beneficiary was his brother Dominick. You don’t suppose…could it be?

  Pallbearers carry the casket of Frank Bellini following his funeral in 1929. The Akron gangster was gunned down outside his store on North Howard Street. From the Akron Beacon Journal.

  The Furnace Street Mission, the “Brightest Spot in the Underworld,” opened in the late 1920s in Joe Congena’s old pool hall. Rosario Borgia plotted the murder of Akron police officers at the hangout in 1917. Author’s collection.

  Private investigator George Martino closed his detective agency in 1919 and got caught in a 1922 liquor-smuggling racket using the Lynn Drug Company as a front. Federal agents seized 139 cases of liquor in the showroom of the East Market Street business near Union Depot. In 1923, he was sentenced to eighteen months in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for conspiracy to defraud the government in violation of the Prohibition law. His name disappeared from Akron newspapers.

  Michael Fiaschetti, the New York detective, received two gold medals in September 1919 from Mayor I.S. Myers and the Akron Chamber of Commerce “for exceptionally skillful work” in helping to solve the police slayings. The Italian Squad director drew the ire of Akron police, however, when he wrote a 1929 article for Liberty magazine in which he took most of the credit for cracking the case. Officers objected, saying Fiaschetti mostly served as an interpreter in 1918. “If Fiaschetti’s other stories are as authentic as this one about the Borgia gang, I pity the poor readers,” Detective Edward J. McDonnell noted. Fiaschetti penned a few autobiographies and retired from the force to become a private detective. He died at age seventy-eight on July 29, 1960, at a VA hospital in Brooklyn.

  Patrolman Walter Horn was seriously injured in July 1919 when his motorcycle crashed into an automobile. He was allowed to resign from the force in November 1920 after he was charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and neglect of duty. He died on November 23, 1964, in Detroit, where he had moved in 1940 to work for the Ford Motor Company.

  Detective Harry Welch was named the chief of the detective bureau when it was organized in 1921. He retired from the force on January 1, 1928, after thirty-one years in the department and ran a private detective agency for a few years. “Other good men may come and may fill Welch’s job very efficiently, but for the old-timers, the gap in the roster made by Welch’s resignation will never
be made up,” Captain Frank McGuire said. Welch suffered a heart attack on January 17, 1933, while driving his car on Glendale Avenue and died en route to a hospital. He was sixty-two years old.

  Detective Bert Eckerman, who joined the force in 1903, retired in 1932 after twenty-nine years on the job. At his testimonial dinner, Eckerman told the audience, “Of course I thank you and there isn’t much else to say, but maybe you’ll remember this, or maybe some of the newer police officers here and others who are to come, will remember: I wouldn’t lie on a man. I wouldn’t send a man to the penitentiary unless I knew he was guilty…and there was never a man come out of that penitentiary, if I sent him there, who wasn’t willing to shake hands with me.” The 280-pound detective died of pleurisy in 1943 at age seventy-five.

  Edward J. McDonnell was named chief of the detective bureau in 1928 after Welch retired and was promoted to captain in 1930. In celebration of McDonnell’s twenty-fifth anniversary with the force, more than five hundred people attended a testimonial dinner in his honor on February 1, 1933, at the Mayflower Hotel. “What success I have had, if I’ve had any, I owe to the men in the detective department and to the good citizens of Akron,” he told the crowd. “From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank each and every one here for making this one of the most important events of my life.” McDonnell had an appendix operation in May 1933 and died unexpectedly a week later of a blood clot to the heart. He was only forty-nine. “The days of a good life are numbered, but a good name continues forever,” Reverend James H. Downie eulogized at St. Vincent.

  John Durkin was one of only six patrolmen when he became a cop in 1883. “When I joined the force, there wasn’t a streetcar in Akron,” he recalled. “There were no electric lights and Market Street was the only thoroughfare in town which boasted paving.” He remained on the job for forty-seven years—a department record—and served as chief for thirty years until failing health forced him to retire on February 1, 1930. Colleagues hailed him for revolutionizing the department. Durkin was seventy-nine when he died on April 14, 1939. “As chief of police, Durkin adhered to a simple code,” the Beacon Journal noted. “On matters which he considered of secondary importance, he gave the town as much or as little law enforcement as it wanted, but he insisted upon the fundamental virtues of honesty and bravery at all times. The results of this course were unquestioning loyalty from his men and the respect of the people.”